Mazatlán Journal; The Bloodstain's Secret: Is Cartel Enforcer Dead?

By TIM WEINER

Published: February 28, 2002

MAZATLÁN, Mexico, Feb. 27—
The remains of Frankie O's disco are a scar on this once-beautiful beachfront, a dung-colored pile of concrete collapsing like a child's sand castle washed by the tide.

This ruined pleasure dome was once the palace of Francisco Arellano Félix, the eldest of the six brazen brothers who run Mexico's most powerful drug cartel. While Frankie and his siblings danced and drank, they also bribed every policeman and politician in sight, buying protection, building a multibillion-dollar family business on deals signed in blood.

Frankie went to prison. Now Mexico wants his blood. The authorities want to check his DNA against the bloodstain left by a man whom the Sinaloa state police shot and killed a mile down the road from the disco on Feb. 10, Carnival Sunday.

They have good reason to believe that the man, who carried a gold-plated handgun and a fake federal police ID, was Frankie's brother, Ramón Arellano Félix, 37, the cartel's famously violent enforcer.

The face on the fake ID looks quite a lot like Ramón's 10-year-old picture on the F.B.I.'s 10-most-wanted fugitives list, minus a shaggy haircut and a drinker's double chin. That face has all but convinced Donald J. Thornhill Jr., a United States Drug Enforcement Administration agent who fought the gang for years while in Mexico and is now based in San Diego.

The bloodstain may be a fitting legacy for a man said to have murdered scores of people for both business and pleasure. At any rate, it is the main clue the authorities have to go on now. Mexico finds itself in the awkward position of chasing a drug lord's ghost.

Mr. Arellano Félix lived fast, and he may have died young. But so far he hasn't left a corpse.

The word on the street, according to United States law enforcement officials, is that Mr. Arellano Félix was indeed in Mazatlán two Sundays ago, as masked revelers were preparing for the Carnival parade. They say that he was gunning for a drug rival, Ismael Zambada, but that Mr. Zambada had bought-and-paid-for friends in the state police who protected him.

The official Mexican version of the case is that the state police spotted two armed men driving a Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street, pursued them and killed them after a wild chase on foot through the Plaza Gaviotas Hotel.

All agree that the next day two mysterious impostors claimed the bodies, paid $600 cash for a cremation and took away the ashes in two urns, one black, one white. No one in officialdom said a word about the case for nine days.

Masked police officers staged a reconstruction of the shooting on the street Tuesday afternoon, with plainclothesmen posing as the men they killed. A passer-by gazed at the scene.

''How weird,'' he said, and kept on walking.

Other circumstantial clues are piling up. Two assault rifles found after the shootout, an AK-47 and an AR-15, were used in the slaying of two federal judges in Mazatlán three months ago, said Mexico's attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha.

The Arellano Félix gang was blamed for that crime, and the rifles suggest that ''this was not some ordinary gunslinger,'' said the governor of Sinaloa, Juan Millán.

But given the history of corruption and connivance in Mexican drug-enforcement circles, more than a shred of public skepticism prevails about the official version of the case. The daily paper Noroeste asked 100 people in Mazatlán if they thought Ramón Arellano Félix was really dead.

A resounding 19 percent said yes.

Twenty years ago, the Arellano Félix family began building an empire here in Mazatlán, founded on brick after brick of the strong marijuana from the mountains above Mexico's Pacific coast. Francisco built five houses, two flanking the disco and three on Shark Avenue, each more grandiose than the next, all now abandoned.

Then, in the mid-1980's, the group's founding father -- Ramón's uncle, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, a corrupt Sinaloa state police officer who served on the governor's protective detail -- had a flash of criminal genius.

He sought and won payment in cocaine, not just cash, from the Colombian cartels. The gang was no longer a group of glorified mules, but multi-ton distributors of the drug. Official D.E.A. estimates say it now handles as much as 40 percent of the cocaine consumed by Americans, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year wholesale.

The Arellano Félix gang set up shop in Tijuana and won its reputation as the most ruthless criminal syndicate in Mexico, taking control of the frontier bordering southern California by the time-honored techniques of murder, terror and torture.

While Mr. Thornhill, the D.E.A. agent, veered among the past, present and conditional tenses in discussing the nasty life of Mexico's most-wanted felon, he was happy to propose an epitaph on his presumed death.

''The man is a sociopath,'' he said. ''He was a stone-cold killer. The world would be a better place without him.''

Photos: One of two men killed in a shootout with state policemen in Mazatlán may have been Ramón Arellano Félix, a notorious drug trafficker.; The man believed to be Ramón Arellano Félix carried a fake federal police ID, left. The photograph resembled the drug kingpin's 10-year-old picture on the F.B.I.'s most-wanted list, above. (Photographs by Associated Press) Map of Mexico highlighting Mazatlán: The Arellano Félix family's drug empire was founded in Mazatlán.